This multidisciplinary seminar aims to examine key debates and perspectives arising from various contemporary challenges to international human rights and emancipatory politics. First, the seminar examines whether, and if so, how the apparently declining influence of the West, the rise of authoritarianism, and increasing material inequality within and between nations could impact the legitimacy and effectiveness of international human rights.

The Arbeitskreis junger Völkerrechtswissenschaftler*innen and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationales Recht have issued a call for papers for a conference on "Cynical International Law? Abuse and Circumvention in Public and Private International Law as well as European Law," which will take place September 6-7, 2019, at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Despite claims to the contrary, and to paraphrase Mark Twain’s famous quip, the rumours of cus- tomary law’s death have been greatly exaggerated – customary international law remains alive and well. Not only is it one of the formal sources of international law, but its importance is underlined by the fact that rules of customary international law cover all areas of international law, are usually binding on all states and continue to be valid law even if they are codified in treaty texts.

Recent years have seen a blossoming of scholarship on the philosophical concept of human rights, and the related notion of human rights law, with contributions from authors as diverse as Allen Buchanan, Charles Beitz, Costas Douzinas, James Griffin, and Gunther Teubner. The objective of this roundtable is to consider the distinctive offering from systems theory to the debate, including the closed systems theory of autopoiesis and open theory of complexity.

The year 2018 marks the 20th anniversary of the Rome Statute that led to the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002. Although initially carried into existence on a wave of humanitarian enthusiasm, the ICC has been highly controversial more or less from the beginning. One of the key battlegrounds in this longstanding dispute over the Court’s legitimacy has been the issue of deterrence. The conjecture that a properly structured and functioning ICC would be able to deter mass atrocities has always figured prominently among the Court’s proponents.